Week 12: Narrowing in on a Concept

Published in

The Futures of Learning, Teaching, and Education: Team Ada

4 min readApr 8, 2018

Carnegie Mellon University
Graduate Interaction Design Studio 2
Spring 2018

We spent the entirety of this week trying to narrow down from 16 concepts, to three concepts, and, finally, to one concept that we can dive deeper into.

Sunday, April 1st

We worked on narrowing down our 16 concepts into three today. Prior to this, we had individually speed dated with 10 participants (2 each). We gathered our notes onto a Google Form to keep organized. For each concept, we asked if the participant liked it: Yes, No, or Maybe and Why?

During the meeting, we reviewed the speed dating notes and took out concepts that participants didn’t like and combined concepts or parts of concepts that people liked. Eventually, we settled on three directions:

Three Concepts

Hybrid Mentorship
Context in Practice
Learning on the Job

Monday, April 2nd

With our three concepts, we sketched out the three storyboards and 4 personas (mentee, new grad, manager, and AI).

Storyboards

Personas

We then received feedback from our Professor Peter Scupelli and our TA, Merig Dagli who gave us good feedback, especially on the mentorship direction:

With the changing economy - as people to move towards gig economy - having this mentorship network is crucial.

Tuesday, April 3rd

In research methods, we learned about Nelson’s 5 Users Rule (of diminishing returns). So we put together a plan to speed date our concept quickly on 5 users: three students (from design, STEM, and business) and 2 AI experts.

Wednesday, April 4th

Today, we mainly spoke to our speeding dating (round 2) participants. Qinlan, a CS PhD student cautioned us that working with AI, we had to be more careful with biases for all of our concepts. She mentioned that the mentorship concept will be the easiest to implement and that it was just also a subset of concept 2 (practice in context). The other students we speed dated with mentioned that they liked the human to human aspect of concept 1 and if we were going with concept 3, that we needed to think about the form because right now it seems too rigid.

Thursday, April 5th

In addition to the 5 users. Today we spoke to our TA, who is a mentee of the Andreessen Horowitz program and Anita Woolley, who is a Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior & Theory in the Tepper Business school.

Some notes from Meric were:

Meric doesn’t want to stimulate real world environments, seemed like i was being interviewed
Meric feels stressed about practice with mentors, if you can practice with other mentees, it won’t be as stressful

Some notes from Anita were:

We could help people move up from entry level through communication skills.
We can help people improve their connection with people from expertise
AI could help the mentor/mentee to frame the meeting (e.g. what are the conversations that they could be having?)
AI / mentor could help people to find resources outside the platform (e.g. connect people together to communication and practice)

Friday, April 6th

Today we started a competitive analysis and a deeper dive into our mentorship concept.

For the storyboard, we decided to make out a scenario where Taylor, a student, is looking to get advice and practice on interviewing. We created a user flow and mapped a storyboard to it. Below that we wrote what we needed to build out and test and some other miscelanneous notes.